iraf.net

Hello,I am trying to figure out how to get iraf to display more than
4 frames using ds9. We are using iraf Rev 2.12.2a-EXPORT
and ds9 Version 3.0.3. From what we understand, these are
recent enough that we should be able to display 16 frames.My student Tersi Arias had received an email from Mike Fitzpatrick
suggesting that we try "unlearn display", which we did, still with
no luck. We just keep getting an error that says we can only
display 4 frames.The relevant line in the tvdisply.par file seems to be: frame, i, a, 4, 1, 4with the last 4 being the operative one as best we can tell.
We tried just editing that last 4 to a 16, which didn't work either.
It did allow us to display to a new frame (something other than 1-4),
but no matter what frame we sent the new image to (5 - 16),
it always got put in the 5th frame and ds9 seemed to think that
frame was frame 16.Can someone help us with this? We are analyzing a very large
ACS/WFC dataset and it's very laborious to deal with the large
numbers of images we need to examine if we can't display them
from within iraf using a script.Is it possible that the versions we are using are not actually
the correct ones? Or is there some other detail of how to make
this work that we might be missing? Should we be talking to
the ds9 folks or you about it?Thanks in advance for your help--Adrienne Cool

Hello; I have sent an e-mail to help@stsci.edu since they
would have more experience with WFC data than us. You might receive additional mail from other members
of the iraf group.Cheers
Nelson Zarate
NOAO

Hi Adrienne,
Sorry for the slow reply, I was travelling and am still
dealing with a mail backlog. I've confirmed that indeed IRAF V2.12
and DS9 3.0.1 and later all allow you to display to frames 5-16
(and use other tasks like IMEXAM/TVMARK on those frames as well).
What happens is that the V2.12 tasks send a dummy "wcs read"
command to the server with a previously unused bit set that should
tell a "new" server to report back with a special version string.
If the task gets this string it updates it's parameters so the
max frame is 16 and not 4. I don't remember you earlier saying that
this was being driven from a script and that may be the vital clue
since the parameter update mechanism would behave differently.
The first test is to try displaying from the standard CL
prompt to verify that you can make this work. If so then try
adding the line cache ("display")to your script so that when the params are updated they'll retain
the new max value. If you can't get it to work on the command line,
verify the DS9 version using the File->About DS9 menu item, and
check that you're using the proper iraf binaries with the command cl> dir bin$x_tv.e long+The file date should be from Jul04 if this is really a V2.12.2a
system.
A second way to check things is to set the environment
variable DEBUG_IIS before starting ds9, i.e. % setenv DEBUG_IIS 2
% ds9 This will cause all the traffic to the server to be printed to the
screen. If the DS9 you're using supports 16 frames (V3.0.1 and
later) you should see the string "version=10" near the top of the
output (try displaying a small image like dev$pix so you won't have
to scroll to see it).
Hope this helps. If you still have problems let me know
whether any of this worked at all, and what didn't.Cheers,
-Mike